The Mist (2007): Fantastic Exploration of Human Desperation but Writing and Acting Bring it Down

I am a fan of Stephen King. He has created some of my favorite books and adaptations, from “The Stand” to Kubrick’s “The Shining.” King is a writer who knows how to write what makes people go crazy and what it would take to bring out the worst in people. “The Mist” does that beautifully, while also sadly catching some of his more hokey dialogue and overused tropes. I’ll explain more of what I mean deeper in the review.

“The Mist” was directed, produced and written by Frank Darabont, with the other producers being Martin Shafer and Liz Glotzer.

The story involves David (Thomas Jane) and his son trapped in a convenience store after a strange storm cuts off all communication and a mysterious mist moves in. From here he must try to keep the survivors from destroying themselves and figuring out what happened.

The Pros: The Premise – The premise of a bunch of characters trapped in a small town convenience store is pretty cool. You have food, but limited resources, people want to get to those outside of the store and usual human personalities clashing since a store is still a confined space.

The World – The idea of another dimension coming into our own is pretty neat as well as the fear that would come with that from the populace as another world or dimension in ours is a complete unknown.

The Idea of the Characters – We have the artist father, the religious fanatic, the single mother, the old cynical man…these are all great ideas but they never feel fully realized. I do like the character ideas though.

Humans Under Fear – King excels at showing people going mad from a feeling of being trapped or attacked. We see this here as they all distrust one another, a fanatic rises from strange situations she manages to survive, people hang themselves and the main character does a mercy killing on his party so they won’t be killed by the monster that had already killed a few from the town already. People get angry, anxious and act irrational under fear…power plays happen and victims are chosen so there is someone to blame. All that is on display in this film.

The Ending – David kills the members of his party who manage to leave the store with him in his truck. He does this with their consent when they see the big monster and realize everyone they know is dead. What David realizes is after he tries to kill himself and fails since he is out of bullets is the army was only minutes away and all the pain and death could have been avoided with more patience, leaving him a broken man.

Okay: The Characters – The characters are all tropes and never get beyond it. We don’t know why the religious lady is crazy or religious, we don’t know why the old man is cynical, we don’t know why David became an artist or why any of the soldiers were serving on the base where the experiment happened. They exist only as tropes because of this.

The Monsters – The monsters are neat looking and look like Lovercraftian Dinousaurs as most have tentacles and wings. They were never scary though which is why I’m putting them at okay. The mist is scarier than the creatures.

The Cons: The Dialogue – Everyone tells rather than shows…it is part of why the characters only exist as tropes. They tell us their obvious motivation and we never get the why.

The Religious Extremist – Religious extremists in fiction are hard to write…as an agnostic who is pretty atheistic it is easy to make someone you disagree with a strawman and this film never gets beyond that. The extremist is never humanized and is the crazy from the get go. This was a disservice to the plot as she became an antagonist whose motivations were never fully explored.

This was a decent movie. It wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination even though I really liked some of the situations the characters were put in. The problem is the characters never managed to get beyond the tropes they existed as. Not a single character was given more depth, they just were and reacted, which was safe but it didn’t contribute to the story in any way and just made some of the awkward dialogue even more obvious. If you are a fan of King, check out this film though. It does do a good job of showing what humans will do when they feel trapped and out of options and that is really where the film excels and manages to be a decent horror film and great contribution to “Horror Month.”